HINCKLEY officials have hit out at claims that the town centre is among the worst when it comes to empty shops.

A new report compiled by the Local Data Company suggests Hinckley has an empty shop rate of 21.03% - a rise of 1.3% over the last year.

According to the organisation’s figures, that puts Hinckley in the 25 worst performing mid-sized towns across the country and eighth worst place in the West Midlands, just ahead of Coventry.

A spokesman for Hinckley and Bosworth Borough Council said: “According to the Local Data Company, Hinckley has an empty shop rate of 21.03% - a figure which the council vigorously disputes.

“We are puzzled as to the methodology used by the company. The council carries out its own survey of empty shops every two months and the latest survey in February revealed an empty shop rate of 12.3%.

“For a rate of 21% to be accurate, there would need to be 60 empty shops in Hinckley town centre, but there aren’t. There are 36.

Jonathon White of the Town Centre Partnership, which runs the Business Improvement District, said he also couldn’t understand where the figures have come from.

“I’m concerned when they put these figures out,” he said. “We’ve gone round and round Hinckley counting the number of empty units. The area they’re looking at pretty much mirrors the same area as ours.

“Our figures are coming down to 13%. I guarantee it won’t be 21%.

“I don’t know how they’re coming to this figure. There are other towns who have got more empty shops than us.”

Jonathon said that there were 13.46% empty ground floor units as of Tuesday last week, a total of 42 out of 312.

Before Christmas he said that there had been a slight reduction in this percentage which has since risen again to 13.7%.

Jonathon said they would be asking the managing director of the Local Data Company to justify the figures and said that he had a similar discussion with him last year.

Matthew Hokinson, managing director of the Local Data Company, said the figures they supplied were done on shops and not units, of which they counted 261. He also said the research was done in December.

“We go on what we see on the day,” he said. “If the shop’s empty, for whatever reason, it’s empty. We go on that.”